My CPA opened me a bank account in the USA (he's from USA too) without me having to visit the states, is this legal? Or is there any risk to this approach?? I'm in the same case as the parent question you have answered :S
Call me stupid, but the only reason why I incorporated an LLC in the States is because I wanted get access to the Stripe API for production (yeah, it's a huge compliment to the Stripe guys ;)
The payment gateways in my country are shit..Also, the US account is only used for the payment gateway, all the IP of my software is owned by the company in my home country. You know, just so someone doesn't sue me for rounded corners and having anchor links on my webpage, stuff like that.
So far so good, I just report EFI (Effectively connected income) to the IRS, which means only the businesses that I do with USA, all signups from other countries aren't taxed by the IRS believe.
This is the author's prejudiced opinion spun into an article. I could write the exact same thing for Ruby, Javascript, etc. PLus, if you are starting a company, the last thing that should matter is your tech stack. The first thing that should matter is your sales strategy.
When is Stripe coming to India? An estimate would be really nice! The only way Indian startups can get to use Stripe right now is by setting up an LLC/LLP in US/UK and accepting payments through the LLC.
The problems with this approach are:
1) High initial cost of setting up the LLC.
2) Lawyer consulting fees and/or CPA fees.
3) Separate taxes for the LLC.
4) The same income is taxed in the country of the LLC AND India.
India is one country that needs Stripe very badly right now. The payment gateways here have the shittiest/unreliable APIs you could imagine of. One of them (CCAvenue) even got hacked and it was found that passwords were being stored in plaintext. (!)
However, the transaction volume is pretty much as high as any other country. Would love to get an idea of when Stripe would become available here..
Also, watchout when you bad mouth them on HN, they use shady tactics to downvote comments written against them (I was a victim once; their employees downvoted me in groups). I don't trust this company nor their employees at all - In fact, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that this blog post was posted by one of their employees and the blog post is just a glorified landing page.
"We're not scared of Microsoft, so signup right now"
What makes you so sure you were downvoted by freshdesk employees and not just HNers who thought your comment was ineffective at portraying a useful point?
note: I am not nor have ever been a freshdesk employee
Citibank is one of the worst banks I've dealt with.
Once, one of their affiliate's employees offered me a Credit Card for free and said "it had no strings attached" and I don't need to do anything to keep it alive. Thought it sounded too good to be true, I bit the bullet and signed up, right on the spot, their affiliate clothing store. Before I was about to submit my documents, it was then I happened to meet a friend by chance and he told me that I would need to purchase a minimum X amount each year mandatorily through the "free" card, failing which I would be levied drastic charges.
Shocked, I asked the affiliate's employee if it was true and he confirmed the same. I politely declined, got my papers from him, and scored the entire application paper off diagonally so that no sane company would accept it as a valid application.
However, the very next day, I get a call from one of Citibank's employees asking me to submit a photograph so that he could forward the application. I was shocked and I asked him how it was even possible to submit a scored out application. Even though I scored off the application, I hadn't scored off my other copies of proof (Driving license, etc). So the rep had cleverly filled out a fresh form just like I would have and even signed where I should have (!) and forwarded the application to the card processing department. I know this because the rep who called told me that the only thing he needed was a passport size photograph and everything else was pucca.
Shocked, I told him that I don't need the card and asked him to stop bugging me. I got routine calls from the same rep for about 3 days and also continuous text messages asking me to submit just the photograph. Heck he would have come to even my house (the address was on the proof I submitted) , he was THAT desperate.
It was then I decided that I would never ever deal with a shady company like Citibank, ever again.
So, I'm not surprised that they are actually so intrusive to even have you unsubscribe from their site. This bank is full of shit.
Its illegal but legal system is so bad that a person who openly swindled 25 billion-dollard in 5 years is going to become a ruler of a province...He will literally buy votes with the money.
Seems yes. These 'credit card' agents employed by the company are generally poor people who are trying to make ends meet (they get some nominal money on every new person signing up for a credit card), and mostly "only" get to too intrusive up to being annoying, but in this case did forgery. The bank might not have anything to do with it though.
Yes, this was in India only. But please don't mistake all of India to be the same, this was a very specific incident and a case concerning a bank with questionable ethics and it's employee, which could likely happen anywhere else in the world.
I was merely asking because this did not align with my experience of Citibank in the US, so I was wondering whether it was a foreign division of Citibank.
FWIW, I'm a Tamil-speaking Indian American. I am aware of the fact that not all of India is the same, but I think the cultural norms do have something to do with this incident.
Hey guys, can someone tell me what exactly is an SDK, or rather how do you design one?
Case in point:
Does the Amazon SDK include their source code?
So, let's say if Amazon offers me an SDK that I can install on my servers to capture analytics on my site. So does that mean, that the SDK they provide me with actually contains their whole source code of their analytics platform?
The way I understand SDK's are a local piece of software that runs on your machine to provide you with an API that you can use. Can someone please straighten this poor soul?
I haven't looked at their SDK yet but it would either come in the form of a compiled library, or uncompiled source code, that (like you said) would give you access to their API within your own project. You do not get the entire source code for their analytics platform, just the part that would let you use it.
1) Your Google+ profile is publicly indexable by searh engines.
2) Having a custom URL means anyone searching for your name on Google is going to find out your Google+ profile easily. Basically, your identity is now even more easier to discover. (When contrasted to the ordinary Google+ URL of random numbers)
3) If you are using the same profile picture on Google+ as your Facebook, people can track your Facebook profile, too. This is bad if you have a fairly active social life, but wanting a bit of a privacy.
